In-House vs. Outsourced SEO: Which Is Right for Your Business?
SEO is what makes your business visible online. It’s an essential part of any strategy…
Backlinks continue to be an important ranking factor for the search engines. However, you might be wondering how you can increase your visibility and traffic if you are not allowed to build backlinks.
Matt Cutts himself has stated, “we will continue to use linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. in order to assess the basic reputation of pages and websites.” So, if you want to enjoy online growth, you need to build backlinks proactively, but you must do so in a safe way to avoid penalisation.
Thwarting a Google penalty isn’t about sheer luck. It is about earning the links that help you to climb the search engines. If you buy a low-quality link, expect to be penalised, but you will not be punished for securing a high-quality link with natural anchor textAnchor text is the text highlighted by a hyperlink. The words highlighted are crucial for SEO, informing Google’s crawling bots about the content of the site linked to. on a trusted, highly authoritative website.
Throughout this article, you are going to learn how to secure high-quality links that can increase your search engine ranking without the risk of a penalty.
Diversify Your Link BuildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. Tactics
Google values organic link building and prefers websites that have earned links by producing great content in comparison to sites that have embarked on an extensive link building campaign. For this reason, you must make sure your link building tactics appear natural. To do so, you must avoid securing links on one type of sites, such as a forum or blog.
Build Relationships with Freelancers on Major Websites
Most major websites will not only have a large, professional team onboard who produce content on a regular basis, but they will also rely on many freelancers to publish exceptional content. If you want to secure a natural link on a high-authority site, attempt to build a relationship with a freelance contributor. If you can make them fall head over heels in love with your product, service or writing, it could result in them sending multiple backlinks to your website over time.
Many professional freelancer writers might also write for more than one high-authority website, which could lead to you securing backlinks on many reputable, trusted websites. So, keep building relationships with multiple freelancers, which could result in your business becoming an industry leader online.
Keep Sharing Your Infographics
Infographics can help your website to naturally secure backlinks. It is also possible to control the anchor text a site owner will use when linking to it. When publishing an infographic, make sure to use an HTML embed code that people can easily copy and paste onto their own sites. Inside the embed code is a link to an image, as well as a backlink to the original page with specified anchor text.
While an exact match anchor text could lead to penalisation, a branded anchor is unlikely to result in a penalty. It is also important to note that only a small percentage of people may use the embed code, which means you will still enjoy a varied anchor text overall.
In addition to people naturally linking to an infographic, you should also reach out to bloggers to ask them to promote it on their website. Write a friendly, helpful email, stating they might want to check out your new infographic and ask for their feedback. While many might click away from an email and never take one look at your infographic, a small percentage might believe it is the perfect fit for their site and will publish it.
Do Something Good for Your Community
As cold as it might sound, many marketers might wonder “what’s in it for me?” when helping a community. However, giving back to society can help both your business and a community. Here are a couple of ways to naturally build links by donating your time or money:
Everyone loves free stuff, which is why a contest is a perfect way to engage with your community and go viral on social media. While this tactic is often best used for generating a solid email marketing list and hundreds or thousands of social followers, it can also help your business to secure many natural links from forums, blogs, and so on.
However, you’ll need to give away a big prize to ensure people enter a contest in their droves. To reduce expenditure, you could partner with local companies and ask them to donate prizes, so you’ll enjoy the benefits of a contest for a lower cost.
Gone are the days when you could donate to charity to secure a great link. However, you can launch a scholarship to secure many higher-quality links. While it might cost you more than a donation, it can help your business to rank higher in the SERPs, which can increase traffic, conversions, and brand recognition.
Before you do so, you must decide how much you’re happy to give away and the person you want to grant a scholarship to. What’s more, you should choose a scholarship that is relevant to your company’s niche. For example, a hospital could create a scholarship for an aspiring doctor or nurse.
Once you’ve launched your scholarship details, start contacting various schools for application submissions, as their sites are often highly-authoritative in the search engines, which may promote your scholarship on their pages or blog posts. As a result, you may build many links relevant to your industry, which can make you a force to be reckoned with in the search engines.
Promote High-Quality Guest Posts
Many businesses write guest posts and generate little backlinks from an article. However, it is possible to maximise every article you publish to improve your search ranking.
The first thing you must do is write the best guest post possible for a third-party website, which will make people want to link back to it on their own sites or social media channels. You also should back up a point made within a guest post by linking to an informative article on your website. It must be relevant to your article while providing the reader with more value, which Google will love.
However, don’t put the article behind you once it’s been published on a website. You should then start promoting it on social media, and you should directly email anyone you mentioned or linked to within the article – and they might promote, email, or link back to your guest post, too. Don’t just share it on social media just once, either, and share it many times with different images and tiles gradually over a number of weeks or months.
The reason you are guest posting on a site will be to benefit from its authority and large readership, and some of this will be filtered back to your website. Remember, the stronger your guest post is on a website, the bigger the benefits to your business.
Aggregate Data or Create Statistics
Many websites want to link back to original research that will add value to their content and be helpful to a reader. Aggregating data or creating statistics could, therefore, help you to generate a considerable amount of backlinks to your website, and you’ll enjoy a diverse link profile, as a result.
However, before you start compiling data, you’ll first need to formulate either a question or theory and then find the data to match it. You could compile the research from official reports, published studies, or you could even put together data that’s never been published before. The more informative and reliable your research, the more people are likely to promote, share and link back to it.
Find Brand Mentions Online and Ask for a Backlink
Many websites might be discussing your brand, product, or service online, but might have failed to link back to your website. All you must do is find the linkless brand mentions and reach out to a webmaster to ask them to insert a backlink.
While it can take a great deal of time and effort to find them, it will be worth it once you start benefiting from their link juice. You could even set-up a Google Alert, as you will be notified every time your brand name is mentioned on a webpage so that it can do some of the hard work for you. It is an effective way to strengthen a diverse backlink profile.
Conclusion
If you want to build safe, powerful links in 2018 and beyond, you need to produce great content that is valuable to a reader. Google penalties are understandably a big concern for businesses and marketers, but it is important to be aware you might be immune from one if you have a diverse backlink profile.
For this reason, you must pay close attention to your profile to secure a strong position in the SERPs. You will need not only to monitor your varied anchor texts and backlinks, but you’ll also need to track and analyse both lost or new links, which could affect your results in the search engines. You can then make the appropriate tweaks to a link building campaign if needed.
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